Government Must Focus On Child Rights To End Child Marriages And Not A Wasteful Leap Program

It’s laudable to try to cater for all forms of vulnerable populations within our nation, but the prevalent conditions suggest that there are clearer and open vulnerabilities with regards to the rights of children which can better be targeted and must be attended to by the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection.

The issue of child rights has reached a desperate need for attention in view of recent stories in the media and very disturbing realities in the lives of children in very deprived areas of the country. Among these include the nightmare realities of rampant teenage pregnancies, rising cases of child marriages and daily incidents of child labor which are fast assuming a part in the lives of children of this country.

The 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Ghana in its article 28 (5) defines a child as someone below the age of eighteen. According to the constitution, a child in Ghana has the right to be protected from engaging in work that constitutes a threat to his health, education or development. The constitution further asserts that no child shall be deprived by any other person of medical treatment, education or any other social or economic benefit by reason only of religious or other beliefs. Quite importantly, the constitution enjoins all parents to undertake their natural rights and obligations of care, maintenance and upbringing of their children in co-operation with such institutions as parliament may, by law, prescribe in such manner that in all cases the interests of the children are paramount.

In the face of these clear guarantees granted children by the ultimate law of the land which recognizes the rights of children as natural, it invokes questions of our basic morality as a nation to appear to have failed woefully to provide our children their own share of God’s given inalienable rights whenever it appears clear that they lack the required parental care.

In fact, the laws of Ghana, in pursuant of guaranteeing the rights of children established the required institutional arrangements to cater for the rights of children. In 2001, the government of John Kuffuor created the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs which later changed to the ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection. In any case, despite the change of name, the mandate and objective of the ministry still remains resolutely clear, straightforward, and unchanged.

The Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection is mandated to formulate gender and children policies and guidelines, propose programs that promote women and children affairs and the development of institutions that encourage women empowerment.

Even though the ministry in recent times has celebrated abolishing the trafficking of children, increasing the number of women in major government sectors, educating women about domestic violence, and improving on domestic violence legislation, so much of its recent policies and programs have witnessed a deviation from its central mandate, thereby promoting gaps in the welfare of women and children and escalating the already prevalent cases of child labor, teenage pregnancies and child marriages among mostly traditional communities in our country.

These problems in recent times have exposed the inability of the state to enforce the provisions of the constitution that call for the protection of the welfare of children by parents, state institutions and most often a collaboration between the two.

In essence, current challenges facing the welfare of children call for the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection to re-assert itself and focus primarily and largely on issues with holistic impact on women and children.

In that case, the implementation of the ongoing Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) program ought to be reviewed and fine-tuned to focus on addressing the pressing issues that tie the hands of children to poverty and puts them right back in the center of the poverty cycle.

The Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty program is a social cash transfer program which provides cash and health insurance to extremely poor households in Ghana to alleviate short-term poverty and encourage long-term human capital development.

The three basic eligibility criteria of the program include orphaned children, elderly poor, and extreme disability. It’s important to state that even though social protection which the LEAP program seeks to enforce is good, it is of no significant impact because of its minimal focus on the welfare of children.

First of all, orphaned children as the program is partially targeting will not achieve educational fulfilment through the LEAP program because the money available is incomparable to the financial demands of education in Ghana at the moment. As it stands, the largest amount of money to be received by any beneficiary is 64 Ghana Cedis which is the amount payable to one member household per month.

However, the cost of admission fees for second cycle education in Ghana today averages 1,000 Ghana Cedis in the three regions in the north which already benefit from feeding grants as part of the Northern Scholarship program instituted by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

What this means is that an orphaned child who will be depending wholly on the 64 Ghana Cedis a month will have to engage in child labor or other indecent means to fully cater for the cost of his/her education if that child is determined to sail through the weary storm of education without parental support.

Also importantly, there is the other class of children who are fortunate to have one or both parents but none of whom can afford the cost of secondary education. For such children, they are not eligible for the LEAP program and their plight is pitiful.

In their case, the only way out is not education because they cannot afford it; their option is what leads to teenage pregnancy, child labour, and child marriages.

Additionally, it’s difficult to determine people who are elderly poor, extremely disabled and orphaned but do not have any form of support. In our local communities, perhaps because of lack of diligence, poor people who have a lot of support get onto the program whiles those with no form of support are left out.

In this case, it can be argued that targeting under LEAP is of no significance to promoting the welfare of children.

However, in our various communities around the country, it is easy to determine the children who are out of school because they cannot afford the cost of education; it is easy to handpick children who carry loads on the streets because they cannot afford the cost of education; it is easy as well to identify teenage girls who are pregnant because they cannot afford to care for themselves; and it is easy to identify children who are married out because they cannot be catered for.

And in any case where traditional communities marry out children with no relation to their inability to cater for the child because of cultural reasons, the state has no problems identifying such cases and enforcing the laws of the land.

Moreover, to justify the LEAP program on the grounds that it provides solutions to short-term poverty and provide empowerment to end poverty in the long-term is logically inadequate. This is because the surest way to ensure that poverty is curbed is to provide empowerment. However, the point of departure from the LEAP program is the fact that sufficient education of children is a better option to consider in the conversation of empowerment. It is the best way to build human capital and promote the development and utilization of the nation’s fullest potentials.

Therefore, to spent these stipends on poorly targeted households whiles still allowing children to be preoccupied with the future threatening hostilities of child labor, teenage pregnancies and child marriages is indeed misplaced. In effect, it amounts to a failure of the state.

Even though it is important to highlight the fact that the LEAP program has helped increase enrollment in basic schools, such an increase cannot be wholly attributed to the program in view of the impacts of the School Feeding Program and the Capitation Grants introduced by government.

Rolling out a LEAP program in the manner it is might be a political scheme to skew out votes and win power, but the state has a bigger role to play to protect the law, to keep children in school, to protect our children whiles they are in school and to secure the rights of our children and the future of our country.

In the lead up to the 2008, 2012 and 2016 general elections, whiles the politicians who superintend over the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection were busy chanting praises upon themselves for how many households they have put on the LEAP program, millions of children across the country were deserting the classrooms.

Whiles the few fortunate children enjoyed lessons in classrooms, their poor colleagues were busy carrying loads on the streets of Tamale, Kumasi, Accra and other big towns, subjecting themselves to sexual abuse for money, and marrying people as old as their grandparents in order to survive.

Whiles the move by some countries to criminalize child marriage for example in Zambia is commendable, it is important to note that the best cure for the problems confronting children lately (child labor, teenage pregnancy and child marriage) can be found in addressing the push factors that lead to these problems. It is to this effect that the welfare of children with regards to education, health and nutrition is being advocated to ensure that they are well empowered and given the license to properly take off into a life of choices fueled by self-determination.

The simple fact is that the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection has done well in trying to implement a social protection policy, but it should eschew the political dividends of such policies and concentrate in rolling out a very tight program to facilitate the educational, health, and nutritional welfare of children who form a larger part of the vulnerable population but yet represent the future of the country.

In doing so, the ministry will also be scaring away the embarrassing menace of teenage pregnancy, child labor and child marriages.

Back in the districts, municipalities and metropolis, what used to be profound was the Department of Social Welfare. This department was popular in the sense that it attended to neglected children as well as children from poor backgrounds and catered for their entire education. If the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection cannot introduce a consolidated program to identify needy children and cater for them, it should as a matter of prime importance resource the Department of Social Welfare well enough to do what it used to do best.

But to engage in cashing out money to people in a program that is ill targeted and does not make the necessary impacts, the ministry is only doing much about nothing. If children’s welfare is properly catered for, both abled and disabled, poor parents will be in no position to need monthly stipends which are in any case used in an effort to cater for the health, nutrition and education of their children.

This begs the question, if the hen feeds the hawk’s young ones, why will the hawk embarrassingly worry the hen on a daily basis.

As a developing country, wasteful duplication is the last we should seek to do. And one way to avoid wasteful duplication is to formulate policies and programs that produce the needed impact holistically.

In our quest to demand for the welfare of the children of this country, we ought to all be guided and strengthened by the fact that child rights are not only lawful but natural, they are not options to be chosen or demands to be negotiated; they are fundamental and inalienable rights that must be fulfilled.

By David Azuliya

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Email: [email protected]